The Twenty Most Influential Southerners of the Twentieth Century

Back in 1998, with Y2K bearing down on us, Mike Burg, president of Edge Marketing in Charlotte, North Carolina, asked me to develop a list of the "twenty most influential southerners" of the century just about to end. He thought he might want to put together some sort of television package. Everybody else was making end-of-the-century lists; why not southerners?

I agreed to do it and, to make a long story short, thirteen distinguished southerners helped me choose our list. The panel was composed of men and women who had written or thought about the South, chosen to be broadly representative of professional fields and subregions. Many of them will be familiar to readers of this magazine, and we provide short bios for each at the end of this South Polls. Not to keep you in suspense, here's the list:

The Twenty Most Influential Southerners Of The Twentieth Century

1. Martin Luther King
2. William Faulkner
3. Elvis Presley
4. Billy Graham
5. Jimmy Carter
6. Louis Armstrong
7. Margaret Mitchell
8. Lyndon Johnson
9. George Wallace
10. Woodrow Wilson
11. Muhammad Ali
12. Hank Williams
13. Sam Walton
14. Bill Clinton
15. Tennessee Williams
16. Ted Turner
17. Huey Long
18. Booker T. Washington
19. Rosa Parks
20. Michael Jordan

Surely every name on this list will be known to every Southern Cultures reader, and that's partly the point. We had to deal with a number of problems of definition, starting with the meaning of "influence"--obviously, it's not the same as greatness, or even goodness. Martin Luther King and George Wallace were both influential, for instance, but surely few admirers of one would argue that the other was a great man. By all accounts, even Governor Wallace suspected toward the end of his life that his influence hadn't been a good one. Just so, Sam Walton was influential: Wal-Mart has certainly changed small-town American life. But for the better? I think the jury's still out on that one.

It works the other way around, too. Someone can be saintly "great" in the sense that really matters--without being influential. In my opinion, James McBride Dabbs was great, as were a number of other white southerners who took an early and unpopular stand against racial injustice. Thank God for whatever influence their witness had, but for the most part they were voices crying in the wilderness, not candidates for the century's most influential.

Obviously and unavoidably, influence--at least as we measured it--has something to do with fame. Ray Wilson Scott has been even more important for competitive bass fishing than Michael Jordan has been for basketball and endorsements, but Scott's famous only in a fairly limited circle: he didn't even come close to making the list. Similarly, presidents of the United States, even mediocre ones, are influential more or less by definition. (Notice that all the southern presidents--even that ambiguous southerner, Woodrow Wilson--make the list, probably ex officio, so to speak. So does Huey Long, a serious contender who influenced national politics by his presence and threat.) But Ella Baker, an unsung heroine of the Civil Rights movement, didn't make the list. Never heard of her? That's my point: she's unsung. Unknown saints will have to get their reward in heaven, as usual.

While we're at it, who's a southerner? Louisville's Muhammad Ali made the list, but Joe Louis, born in Alabama, did not. (Louis moved to Detroit when he was twelve.) Colonel Harland Sanders didn't make the short list, but he finished strong: I don't think anyone held it against him that he came from Indiana. Thurgood Marshall was influential, no doubt about it, but the panel eventually concluded that someone born in Baltimore and educated in Pennsylvania and D.C. and who...